Give the right credit, it is always on message, which is to say, always dissembling in order to always be pounding into our skulls, whether we realize it or not, one simple philosophical message--self-interest is "good" and anything that interferes with self-interest is "bad."
Me? Easily distracted. Sometimes I get sad at the state of the world. Like now. I'd like to talk about the root causes--of Robin Williams' death. Mourning Gazans and Michael Brown? Short shelf life. Too hard. Boring me already. BDS? Forget about it! I am going to focus on Robin Williams.
I go to the youtubes. I watch a few great Robin Williams clips from days of yore. And then I naively stumble on this initially subtle bile-ridden almost hour-long piece ostensibly on Robin Williams by this person I have never heard of called Stefbot, whom I later learn is Stefan Molyneux, who has "the largest and most popular philosophy show on the web." I didn't know. I mind my own business and don't get out much. I was mesmerized.
A third of the way in, I was all with him. And then he slipped in the name Ayn Rand, and my commie reddish and greenish tie-dye ears attached to my pointy head perked up. I won't give you the link. Don't watch it. Trust me. It is crypto-misogyny and far right economic theory rolled into one doozy of an intellectually-stimulating homage to Robin Williams and regret at his psycho-social upbringing: If only he had told that shrink how bad his father and mother really were! And, most importantly, if only those B---- ex-wives hadn't taken all his hard-earned goddamn money! Their disgusting selfish addiction to his rightful cashola killed him.
Who needs poor folk with their bad manners, oppression, wall-less prisons for sometimes millions living in concrete wastelands, economic malaise, and what not when I can focus on Robin Williams and those B------ who have taken him for $35 million frickin' dollars worth of alimony, and counting? And even post-grave the larceny by the B------ will continue. Poor man had a pig valve from all the stress. Had to take a crappy sitcom and sell his Mork costume and Mrs. Doubtfire dress when he should have been kicking back and eating the sweet fruits of his labor with the new babe of his choice. And every other welfare donee, sucking the ever-loving life out of ME, the true beaten down, just like they did out of poor Robin. It's all the socialist's goddamn fault, with an assist from their asshole marital lawyer friends, bringing the men down where the vultures will pick over their bones. Bring me The Fountainhead. Ah!
Where Will "OUR" Philosophical Garden Grow?
Marshall McLuhan was sort of right, the owners of the mediums are ever massaging our brains. Even counting the capitalist-owned "liberal" MSNBC and some poorly-followed AM radio shows, the left (by which I mean the serious left, to the left of capitalism-accepting liberal) in the U.S. has no fair major forum in which to defend itself, much less advance itself. Certainly it has no overall presence in the commercial U.S. media that is the equivalent "intellectual" counter to the right, including the well-funded libertarian right. Therefore, it is critical that the left makes its message heard loud and clear on the interwebs in an accessible and interesting front page manner. The left is not able to compete in the commercial U.S. media world with the Fox and Rush Limbaugh blowhards on television and radio but that is not the real challenge in the long run. IMHO, the real challenge in the long run is with the much more nimble right wing new media messengers of equally hateful, but tearful, brainy, and readily convincing "Stefbot"-style philosophy who "intellectually" empower the acolytes of Rand Paul and other U.S. so-called "libertarians." For the purposely amorphous and slippery pot-deeply-inhaling U.S. "libertarianism" does have youth appeal. And the battle is over the skulls of the next generation, to inculcate them with the right's greed/fear or the left's love/hope, because this generation of capitalist skull-pounded clones in the U.S. has pretty well already fucked things up beyond redemption.
When I see Ferguson and Gaza, and see the lack of leadership from the Clinton protégés, that sinking feeling comes that love/hope are just greeting card words, without mooring in material reality. Root causes, when will they get to the root causes? Never. And when I see even this website, the beacon of liberalism in the U.S., freeze Palestinians out of the front page and even largely tiptoe around the root causes in Ferguson, well ...
Don't think I am disloyal liberal friends. Billions of earthings, Nanu-Nanu!, have learned that capitalism doesn't work. And my heart is with my comrades who develop, promote, and seek real world application of a philosophy of deep democracy, with meaningful love and justice for all. But for now you have my mites (the coins not the bugs) and my votes. For instance, I am resigned that in 815 days (assuming early voting is taken away in the Deep South) I probably will have to vote for the beyond pathetic Hillary Clinton for President. I pine for a legitimate at least modestly liberal opponent to challenge her in the primary. I have recently signed two Bernie Sanders for President petitions, even though he too is beyond pathetic on Palestine. Yada, yada, yada. You can't always get what you want. Hell no you can't.
But if you try sometimes well you might find, you get what you need. And with Hillary Clinton, I fear that she will not even try, and the human beings of Ferguson and Gaza, and Opa-Locka and Detroit, will not get what they need. And the libertarian faux intellectuals will go largely un-rebutted. And the youth of the U.S. will learn in school how wrong it is that they are even in public school and that they should take what they can before the black and brown takers take it all!
Pessimistic prediction if the left does not get its voice back in U.S. society, as it was a century ago when Eugene V. Debs walked the earth: We ain't seen nothin' yet. Crypto-fascism is coming to the U.S. in a big way, not seen since the '50s, schooled in Karl Rovian techniques, paid for by unlimited donations from billionaires, and from the mouths of those who most claim to be against fascism. There will be no equivalent opposing argumentation given for the benefit of building empathy for the vulnerable, and centrist triangulating Clinton crap will gradually fill the petri dish of U.S. politics with juicy warm wet media in which we will see how bad it can get. Assuming Hillary Clinton can win the presidency and keep it for eight years, SCOTUS will be better than if the Republicans won, I will grant you that. But the "intellectually" mesmerizing "libertarian" right will get mo among the young it does not deserve, and those ghettos will be getting bigger and grimmer every day.
Why deal with root causes? Because that's what we need to do. But we won't focus on that. How we will miss Robin Williams though! One woman breaking through the highest glass ceiling will be good, but not nearly enough for the people in need. We don't need the man from hope, or his admittedly tough-as-nails wife. We need actual hope. And hope will not arise from lies. Things are bad in Gaza and Ferguson, and across most of the planet. But not just on those rare occasions when the television cameras and reporters come.
The youth of America no longer say "Nanu-Nanu!" It is now quaint that in Season 3 Episode 2, "When the Earth spirits are leaving Mork, he briefly quotes President Reagan saying 'What would this country be without this great land of ours?'" Let's hope that the youth of America don't think, ten years from now, that the left is the side of the dumb shits. If it does, it may be because not only the centrist Republican-lite Clinton-types, but also the hierarchy of the supposedly liberal and progressive places in the new media that are not the primary habitat of the Clinton-types, shut the left out of the front page conversation. The world, including the U.S., needs to see the unvarnished truth about root causes on the front page at Daily Kos and other elite liberal and progressive blogs.